Richard Feynman on Erwin Schrödinger

I thought it is interesting to see what the great Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman said about Erwin Schrödinger's attempts to discover the famous Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics:

When Schrödinger first wrote it [his equation] down,

He gave a kind of derivation based on some heuristic

Arguments and some brilliant intuitive guesses. Some

Of the arguments he used were even false, but that does

Not matter; the only important thing is that the ultimate

Equation gives a correct description of nature.

                                    -- Richard P. Feynman

(The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III, Chapter 16, 1965.)


It has been my experience in reading physics books that this sort of `heuristic' reasoning is part of doing physics. It is a very creative (sometimes not logical!) art with mathematics in attempting to understand the physical world. Dirac did it too when he obtained his Dirac equation for the electron.